In another emotionally-driven but light-on-facts anti-Israel screed published in The Hill Times on July 25, Alex Neve and Dorotea Gucciardo attacked Israel’s humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza, characterizing them as insufficient and demanding that Ottawa punish Israel instead.

Neve is the former director of Amnesty International Canada, a group that has shown an aggressive and one-sided fixation with Israel, and Gucciardo is director of development for Glia, a “Canadian medical solidarity organization.”

Among Glia’s team members are Tarek Loubani, an anti-Israel activist who claims he was shot by Israeli soldiers in mysterious circumstances and who has claimed Jerusalem executes medical staff, as well as Benjamin Thomson, a nephrologist who was suspended by his employer, Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital, for spreading conspiracy theories that denied the well-documented evidence that Israelis were sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. Thompson has also tacitly defended Hamas terrorism, calling them “resistance.”

In their column, the pair made the baseless allegation that “Palestinians are being starved by deliberate political design.”

No mention was made by Neve and Gucciardo of the two million meals being sent into Gaza every single day by the much-attacked Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), though they did predictably claim that Israel attacks Gazans trying to get aid, citing the Hamas-run “Palestinian Ministry of Health” as supposed evidence.

Despite literally millions of meals being sent into Gaza daily, the authors had the temerity to declare that there is famine in the territory. They failed to utter a single word about Hamas’ theft of aid in Gaza, which is the precise reason why the GHF was created in the first place, to ensure that terrorists could not seize large amounts of goods, which is exactly what has been documented on camera again and again.

Neve and Gucciardo, pulling on the reader’s heartstrings, wrote that “one’s heart shatters thinning of the cruel and painful consequences for the children of Gaza.” What went unsaid is that the war could end at any time that Hamas chooses. Not only did the Palestinian Islamic terrorist group start the war with its invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, but by continuing to hold dozens of hostages kidnapped that day, it is making the conscious decision to perpetuate the war because it sees it as advantageous.

But blaming Palestinian terrorists for bringing destruction and war is apparently not in the interest of Neve and Gucciardo, who prefer a hysterical attack on Israel instead, in spite of a veritable mountain of evidence that defeats their central claims.

But it is worse than that. Blaming Israel for Hamas’ decisions is not only ignorant, but helps to provide important rhetorical cover for the terrorist group’s actions. As Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has pointed out, “anyone who talks about famine in Gaza and of Israel’s manifest responsibility to prevent it but refuses to notice that Hamas actively and violently disrupts aid channels it can’t control…is only helping to ensure more war and suffering.”

Neve and Gucciardo may claim (and even genuinely think) that they don’t like suffering in Gaza, but by penning an opinion column in The Hill Times which blamed Israel for Hamas’ crimes, they are helping to legitimize – and in turn, perpetuate – Hamas’ war.